Rivers belong to the most intensively human influenced ecosystems on Earth, and there is no doubt that the recently documented regional and global extinctions of freshwater fauna are due to human activities. To give an example, the present decline in freshwater biodiversity in North America is about five times greater than for terrestrial fauna. Climate change may further regionally amplify this trend through changes in water temperatures and chronic reductions in water availability, potentially endangering more species in the near future. Under these circumstances, understanding the present-day factors and processes that drive freshwater diversity at large spatial extents (e.g. global and European scale) is a critical step for elaborating predictive models of changes in response to ongoing and future changes.

2 How is your work relevant to policy makers, conservationists and/or the general public?

It will provide science-based answers to pressing conservation questions that are currently being asked by our societies.

Image: Thierry Oberdorff

3 Why is the BioFresh project important?

I can list two main reasons. First, freshwater ecosystems provide goods and services of critical importance to human societies yet are unfortunately among the most heavily altered ecosystems. However, efforts to set global conservation priorities have, until now, largely ignored freshwater diversity, thereby excluding some of the world’s most speciose and valuable taxa. There is thus an urgent need to fill the gap for freshwater biodiversity.

What is The Freshwater Blog?

Features, interviews and analyses on freshwater conservation, science and policy.

For comments, ideas and submissions, you can contact us here: info [at] freshwaterblog.eu

The blog was founded and edited between 2010-14 by the BioFresh project, an EU-funded project that built a global information platform for scientists and ecosystem managers with access to all available data describing the distribution, status and trends of global freshwater biodiversity.

Since 2014, the blog has been managed and edited by the MARS project – an EU-funded project which investigates how multiple stressors affect rivers, lakes and estuaries.

The Freshwater Information Platform provides up-to-date information on freshwater science as well as an array of research resources and tools for the assessment and management of freshwater ecosystems.